Library & Archives

Open Assess (?), Excess(?), ACCESS (!!!)

April 20, 2014 by Amanda VerMeulen

Earlier this semester, the SMCM Ethics Bowl team traveled to Florida to compete in the national finals. Over thirty teams qualified and we had some very formidable opponents. This is the second year in a row that a question about libraries has been among the cases that each team has to prepare. This year the case was titled “Open Exce$$,” and it was all about the Open Access movement.

The two team members tasked with preparing the case arranged to meet with me. “So,” I asked, “do you know what open access is?
“Sure – all those articles we can access online.” Not exactly, I explained. “Open access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.” Open access textbooks are also included.

Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. – See more at: http://www.sparc.arl.org/issues/open-access#sthash.KCIUGtB8.dpuf

That was followed by several conversations about academic journals, publishers, prices, and access. I reminded the students that their access to pretty much all of the licensed content we provide will go away after they graduate. We talked about limits to access at colleges with even fewer resources than we have, and in places around the world where students and libraries cannot afford subscription and license costs. And we talked about how costs shift. The case study the students worked on focused some attention on the author fees that many open access publishers require. Let’s face it, publishing anything requires resources (human and financial). The Ethics Bowl case highlighted the problem of “predatory publishers.” In order to help them learn more about how complex this all is, I encouraged them make good use of what is one of the most important sources of information about Open Access, a web site created by Peter Suber.

It occurred to me early in our conversations that students, especially undergraduates, might not really feel as if all this matters much to them. After all, those JSTOR articles pop up using JSTOR, our discovery tool, and Google Scholar. It’s convenient, at least for now. It can be a challenge talking with faculty to talk with faculty about open access. Librarians are expanding the dialog to include focus on the role of smaller colleges (the Lever Initiative) and on why these issues are important to all students. The Right to Research Coalition has great information about why open access is important and how students can be active in advocating for it.

Should research be a commodity? Should knowledge and creativity be for sale? Should authors, artists, and composers continue to give up their rights to control how their materials are used in exchange for publication in a journal which libraries pay for?

Open access is a question for ethicists, economists, and everyone who produces and consumes information. If you are reading this post that includes you.

TOB X: March Madness for books

April 1, 2014 by Amanda VerMeulen

Last Friday the Morning News Tournament of Books declared The Good Lord Bird by James McBride the winner of TOB X. I added this to my to-read pile along with one other TOB competitor, Long Division by first time author Kiese Laymon whose writing judge Héctor Tobar described as, “a tour de force of colloquialisms and street slang put to intellectual good use,” before eliminating it from the competition in the first round. It lost to Donna Tartt’s Goldfinch a novel I am committed to never reading.

Two is not an impressive number of newly discovered reads and I didn’t go into the tournament having read a lot of the books. Just three and a half, At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón, Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri and about half of A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki.

This actually reflects my sense of my 2013 reading year. I don’t have the stats but it wasn’t a year full of books I loved. Few of the books I liked made the TOB, only the Alarcón and Atkinson. And The Lowland is by far Lahiri’s weakest work. So I took a look at the TOB long list to see how that stacked up and found a lot of books I read or that were on my to-read list that didn’t make the cut. There were a lot. Read Pamela’s recommendations from the TOB long list.

Money, Money, Money

March 10, 2014 by Amanda VerMeulen

photo by Jean O’Connor

This week the library hosts Trevor Dawes, the current president of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL). Trevor has been a strong and vocal advocate for financial literacy and the role librarians can play in helping students become more knowledgeable and more active in controlling their own financial futures. Trevor has partnered with the iOme Challenge initiative to help librarians learn more about how we can support this effort.

I am convinced that library financial literacy is becoming as important for people who use libraries as it is for the librarians and staff who have to spend and manage money. We are using funds supplied by our institutions (and at least partly by tuition dollars) to purchase the materials that we think best support the curricula of the college and also provide outlets for reading, viewing, and listening (and sometimes gaming) that balance all that intense academic work.

Students and faculty are still often surprised to hear that the electronic version of a journal will probably cost us about as much as the print version. And inflation affects everything. Most people don’t think about what it costs to keep a physical book on a shelf once we buy it. If you are a librarian, ask a class (or a group of faculty) what they estimate we spend per year on our online resources. The responses may surprise you. If we purchase an e-book and are unable to make it accessible to more than one user at a time, or through Interlibrary Loan, is it a better “deal” than a physical book which has some, but not all, of the same limitations? Our economic decisions are based on more than just dollars and cents.

Like all departments on campus, the library buys equipment and supplies, pays for equipment leases (yes – the Xerox machine), pays people who work here, and supports the professional development of our staff. And like lots of places these days we do it with less money than we used to. This means making strategic decisions, but also keeping people in mind. It might mean buying a DVD for $14.99 which we know will make people feel good, and spending a much larger amount on a resource that is critical for the success of faculty and students.

The economic landscape is shifting. Colleges and universities are experiencing challenges with enrollment, changes in curriculum, and increases in costs. The more we know about how funds are spent the smarter we will be about the decisions we are faced with. Financial literacy is the key to all of our financial futures.

Meet a Man of the Stacks!

March 5, 2014 by Amanda VerMeulen

Trevor A. Dawes is truly a man of the stacks. He served as project coordinator for a library themed calendar, The Men of the Stacks (2012). You should visit this calendar now. It was for a good cause (It Gets Better Project) and it looks like the guys had a lot of fun. (Yes, I own this calendar and yes, it was January for a really long time that year.)

Trevor is the current president of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) and an Associate University Librarian at Washington University. He will be on campus next week, March 10th and March 11th. On Monday he will be meeting with students to discuss leadership and on Tuesday with faculty and staff on sustaining excellence in the workplace.

Trevor chose financial literacy as the theme of his presidency and has for many years been interested in leadership and diversity. I first met Trevor at a leadership program in 2002, the Minnesota Institute for Early Career Librarians and he has been leading ever since. Not only does he have a long record with ACRL, he has been a board member of the NJ Library Association and in 2007 was one of Library Journal’s Movers & Shakers.

So stop by the Aldom Lounge and meet Trevor.

Interview: On Leadership with Trevor A. Dawes
Are you a student leader, activist or volunteer? Wondering if you have what it takes to lead after graduation? Ask Trevor.
Monday March 10 at 4:15 PM in the Aldom Lounge

Sustaining Excellence in Libraries
Collaboration, diversity and professional development, they’re not just for libraries. Learn about best practices in libraries and how they can work for your department.
Tuesday March 11 at 10:00 AM in the Aldom Lounge

SMCM Library on YouTube

March 5, 2014 by Amanda VerMeulen

I suspect that not many people know this, but the SMCM Library has its own YouTube channel. Why would a library need a YouTube channel? Good question.

The library is a swiftly changing place. From week to week or month to month there is always something new: a new journal we just picked up, a new database we now license, or a new service we are piloting. We’re anything but stagnant, and we thought that creating fun videos to publicize library services and collections would be a great way to let you know what’s happening within the library’s walls.

As I’ve mentioned before, the library hired a fantastic student this fall, Eden Anbinder, to create publicity videos for the library. You can view them all at our library’s YouTube channel. They’re short, fun, goofy, and entertaining. You might even learn something in 1 minute or less!

Timeless W.W.II-era St. Mary’s Scrapbook as True Today as it Was Then.

February 21, 2014 by Amanda VerMeulen

Guest Blog Post written by
Jennifer Housley, SMCM ‘2014, Archive Student PFP Fellow

As a soon-to-be graduate nearing the halfway mark of my last semester, I am struck by several things.

The impending doom of graduate school responses. The frantic job search. The panic of last minute OneSearches for that final, perfect SMP secondary lit source. And, of course, the already pervasive feeling of nostalgia as we walk down our always comforting campus path, considering the speed with which our time here is coming to an end. A comfort to those of us leaving St. Mary’s, however, is the timelessness of this place, as is reflected in a new collection of online images in the college’s archives – the scrapbooks of Doris Ann “D.A.” Hughen, née Miller, class of 1945.

D.A.’s time here was, in some ways, very different than ours. Her college experience coincided with World War II, as is depicted in her photograph taken with a military cadet from Charlotte Hall Military Academy and her snapshot of a military sea plane on St. Mary’s River.

Of course, her time was different in more laughable ways, too.

Smoking Permission Form

But then we see photographs like these, where you can see yourself as clearly as you see Doris laying by the docks with friends, or ice skating in the winter, or peering out over the Garden of Remembrance in one of those rare, quiet moments we have grown to appreciate.

D.A. Miller Hughen graduation photo, 1945

As we go to seek the next adventure, let’s keep in mind that we are not alone in our love for St. Mary’s. Far from it. Even as we leave her for a while, she doesn’t leave us.

“Tho’ sum-mer turns to win-ter and the pre-sent dis-ap-pears,
The laugh-ter we were glad to share still ech-oes thru the years.
While oth-er nights and oth-er days have found us gone our sep’-rate ways
We have these mem’-ries of St. Mary’s.”

“Memories of St. Mary’s,”
lyrics found in MSS 007 D.A. Miller Hughen papers

To view all of the images from the D.A. Miller Hughen Scrapbook that have been added to the SMCM Historic Photograph Collection, follow this tinyurl: http://tinyurl.com/p8m8euy

Students Make the News

February 17, 2014 by Amanda VerMeulen

The library hires lots of students. They do all sorts of things both behind the scenes and at the circulation desk. Over the years they have checked out books, refilled paper trays, given directions, put barcodes in books, reshelved thousands of books and even relocated the DVD section from behind the circulation desk to the public shelves. But what do they do when they aren’t working in the library? Really cool stuff. Read long time library employee Ted Pugh’s article, “Playing His Cards: The Legacy of Paul Reed Smith and the Guitars that Built Him,” in The Mulberry Tree. And Ted doesn’t just write about PRS guitars, he plays one.

Ted Pugh and Scott Taylor

A reminder of our (no) fines policy

February 11, 2014 by Amanda VerMeulen

Hello from the front desk! Despite the snow days, the semester is now in full swing and the books, DVD’s, Kindles, extension cords, laptop chargers, and more are quickly moving back and forth across the front desk – from us to you and back again. So I wanted to take a moment to remind everyone of our fine policy.

Our fine policy is simple: with a few exceptions, there are no overdue fines. And these aren’t wide-ranging exceptions that basically include everything – nothing like “no fines except on days that end in ‘y'”. When we say “no fines”, we mean it!

Having said that, the exceptions are as follows:

items from the media center: if it comes from the third floor of the library where Ken, Linda, Raven, and Andy work, it’s subject to overdue fines.
course reserves: if it’s on course reserve at the front desk (three hour, overnight, or three day loan) – it’s subject to overdue fines. This doesn’t apply to e-reserves, only to physical items you check out at the front desk.
recalled items: it doesn’t happen too often, but every once in a while you’ll get a “recall notice” email. That’s letting you know that someone else wants to use the item. Read that email closely because it gives you a new due date. If you turn it in late, you’ll get fined.
USMAI/ILLiad items: if you borrow something from another library, either through USMAI or ILLiad, you’ll get fined if it’s late. The amount varies depending on the library that owns the item.

So if none of the above applies, then you won’t be fined for returning it late. Now, if you NEVER return it, you will eventually get billed for it. But if it’s a day or a week late – nothing.

The reason for this policy is simple. We want you to borrow all the items you need, for research, fun, etc., without worrying about anything except whether you want or need it. And not to sound “braggy” but we’ve got a lot of stuff! Almost 200,000 books, mostly academic but many popular titles as well, (and several thousand more ebooks), nearly 3,000 DVD’s, six Kindles pre-loaded with about 40 bestsellers, scores of equipment such as Mac chargers, extension cords, headphones, flash drives, etc. So if it’ll make your life easier, or better, go for it! We’re open until 1:00 AM Sunday – Wednesday, midnight on Thursday, and 9:00 PM on Friday and Saturday, so there’s plenty of opportunity for you to stop by.

Happy librarying!

Discovery, but not so discoverable

February 4, 2014 by Amanda VerMeulen

OneSearch. We like it a lot. It’s the main search on the library website and will give you everything from journal and newspaper articles to books, images and DVDs. It’ll retrieve anything it can find somehow related to your search terms. It’s a great tool and time saver.

Despite all the positive things we have to say about OneSearch, we’re feeling a bit frustrated at the moment. We always knew, and do our best to explain, the results in OneSearch would not include everything which the library owns or has access to. OneSearch provides a service. It pulls results from the library catalog and databases in one search, on your behalf, so you do not have to search the catalog and databases individually. In exchange for this service (and in order for this service to function properly and legally) the company which owns OneSearch, EBSCO, has signed licensing agreements with other database vendors and publishers. The providers who do not agree to such terms do not participate in the service. We knew about these agreements, always and from the beginning.

OneSearch is accessible from off-campus. Students, faculty and staff members can search and must only authenticate into the system to access the full text of articles. Members of the community can search our holdings and view citations, but not access licensed materials. To borrow a book or read an article, a community member would have to physically come to the library. This “guest access” is helpful to our community members who rely on our resources for their research needs, and to students from other academic institutions who also use our resources.

Something has changed in the licensing agreements. Now, some of the citations themselves are inaccessible and un-viewable to anyone off-campus unless that person authenticates using a network ID and password. What does that mean? Faculty, staff members, and students, have to login before being able to view all the results displayed. It’s an extra step, but not any different from searching a database from off-campus. Members of our community, however, can no longer search across our collection and view article citations from the databases while off-campus. Essentially, OneSearch, which is designed to promote discovery and access, is now limiting that freedom and access and our patrons are suffering because of it. What to do about it? We’re not really sure yet.

Open Assess (?), Excess(?), ACCESS (!!!)

Popular vs Scholarly articles